- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: Addison Wesley; 1 edition (30 Sep 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0321332059
- ISBN-13: 978-0321332059
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 18 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 807,606 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Say what you will about Microsoft, they know how to successfully build and
release software. Vince Maraia has been a key member of the build teams for
many of their major software releases over the last fifteen years. In this book he
distills the wisdom he has learned about building software, while also setting it
into the context of related steps, including configuration management and
deployment. While he uses Microsoft tools and case studies from within
Microsoft, the book is as tool-agnostic as possible, to make the ideas applicable
to the broadest possible range of readers. The book is written so that each
chapter builds upon the previous one, following the standard development
schedule; however, each chapter can also stand alone as a reference to that
particular piece of the process. Microsoft has been so successful at developing
build procedures that work that they will be incorporating many of them in the
forthcoming suite of products called Visual Studio 2005 Team System, so this
book is being released at a very opportune time.
From the Back Cover
"Wow, what can I say? Chapter 4, 'The Build Lab and Personnel,' by itself is enough justification to purchase the book! Vince is obviously a 'Dirty Finger Nails' build meister and there is a lot we can all learn from how he got them dirty! There are so many gems of wisdom throughout this book it's hard to know where to start describing them! It starts where SCM should start, at the end, and works its way forward. This book is a perfect complement to the 'Follow the Files' approach to SCM that I espouse. I will recommend that every software lead and software configuration management person I work with be required to read this book!"
—Bob Ventimiglia, autonomic logistics software configuration manager, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics
"The Build Master contains some truly new information; most of the chapters discuss points that many people in the industry don't have a full understanding of and need to know. It's written in a way that is easy to read and will help a reader fill holes in their vision regarding software build management. I especially liked Vince's use of Microsoft stories to make his points throughout the book. I will purchase the book and make certain chapters mandatory reading for my build manager consultants."
—Steve Konieczka, SCM consultant
"Vince does a great job of providing the details of an actual working build process. It can be very useful for those who must tackle this task within their own organization. Also the 'Microsoft Notes' found throughout the book provide a very keen insight into the workings of Microsoft. This alone is worth purchasing this book."
—Mario E. Moreira, author of Software Configuration Management Implementation Roadmap and columnist at CM Crossroads
"Software configuration management professionals will find this book presents practical ideas for managing code throughout the software development and deployment lifecycles. Drawing on lessons learned, the author provides real-world examples and solutions to help you avoid the traps and pitfalls common in today's environments that require advanced and elegant software controls."
—Sean W. Sides, senior technical configuration manager, Great-West Healthcare Information Systems
"If you think compiling your application is a build process, then this book is for you. Vince gives us a real look at the build process. With his extensive experience in the area at Microsoft, a reader will get a look in at the Microsoft machine and also how a mature build process should work. This is a must read for anyone doing serious software development."
—Jon Box, Microsoft regional director, ProTech Systems Group
"Did you ever wonder how Microsoft manages to ship increasingly complex software? In The Build Master, specialist Vince Maraia provides an insider's look."
—Bernard Vander Beken, software developer, jawn.net
"This book offers an interesting look into how Microsoft manages internal development of large projects and provides excellent insight into the kinds of build/SCM things you can do for your large-scale projects."
—Lance Johnston, vice president of Software Development, SCM Labs, Inc.
"The Build Master provides an interesting insight into how large software systems are built at Microsoft covering the set up of their build labs and the current and future tools used. The sections on security, globalization, and versioning were quite helpful as these areas tend to be overlooked."
—Chris Brown, ThoughtWorks, consultant
"The Build Master is a great read. Managing builds is crucial to the profitable delivery of high-quality software. Until now, the build process has been one of the least-understood stages of the entire development lifecycle. This book helps you implement a smoother, faster, more effective build process and use it to deliver better software."
—Robert J. Shimonski, Networking and Security Expert, http://www.rsnetworks.net
The first best-practice, start-to-finish guide for the software build process
Managing builds is crucial to the profitable delivery of high-quality software; however, the build process has been one of the least-understood stages of the entire development lifecycle. Now, one of Microsoft's leading software build experts introduces step-by-step best practices for maximizing the reliability, effectiveness, timeliness, quality, and security of every build you create.
Drawing on his extensive experience working with Microsoft's enterprise and development customers, Vincent Maraia covers all facets of the build process—introducing techniques that will work on any platform, on projects of any size. Maraia places software builds in context, showing how they integrate with configuration management, setup, and even customer support. Coverage includes
How Microsoft manages builds: process flows, check-in windows, reporting status, and more
Understanding developer and project builds, pre- and post-build steps, clean builds, incremental builds, continuous integration builds, and more
Choosing the right build tools for your projects
Configuring source trees and establishing your build environment—introducing Virtual Build Labs (VBLs)
Planning builds for multiple-site development projects or teams
Determining what should (and shouldn't) be kept under source control
Managing versioning, including build, file, and .NET assembly versions
Using automation as effectively as possible
Securing builds: a four layer approach—physical, tracking sources, binary/release bits assurance, and beyond
Builds powerfully impact every software professional: developers, architects, managers, project leaders, configuration specialists, testers, and release managers. Whatever your role, this book will help you implement a smoother, faster, more effective build process—and use it to deliver better software.
© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
There aren't many books in this speciality and fewer that make sense in practice. There is very little in this book which is not relevant to any SCM team. Even Release managers with years of experience can gain from reading this volume. It has been in constant use since it was purchased by my company and has started to influence our corporate policies. The book reads well and is simply says this is the way we did it and these were the problems we had and here is our solution. Neat and clear view of an adopted methodology. I'm certainly pleased I bought it.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
My copy of this book is full of odd errors (missing or substituted letters) that renders most of the diagrams unreadable. I find the content slight.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
16 reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
a centralised build process
5 Nov 2005
Format:Paperback
If you have a team of 30 or more programmers, then Maraia offers good suggestions on how to design your build processes so that these can both handle your current team, and scale up to hundreds or even thousands of programmers. The book uses Microsoft's own development effort as the central case study. Given that Microsoft has massive software development efforts, you may want to pay attention.
The book can be read at two levels. One is if you want to use the development tools from Microsoft, that the book talks about. If your team works under a Microsoft operating system, and uses Visual Studio, then indeed, this can be germane.
But you don't have to be using any Microsoft product at all, to reap some gain from the text. The key idea is to have a group of developers who maintain a centralised build process. (They can certainly have other duties.) Here, the book argues about having a metalevel, if you will. Where this build process can and will change over the project's lifetime. If the project has several subgroups, as it will if it is large enough, then each subgroup uses this same central build to make its own binaries.
The centralising fights a natural tendency for a large project to have subgroups that drift apart. In part by imposing a top-down discipline on the subgroups to have their developments conform to this build.
The book also goes into various good practices that your group should use. These have been covered in other books on software projects. The distinctive part of the text is the above discussion on the centralised build.
The book can be read at two levels. One is if you want to use the development tools from Microsoft, that the book talks about. If your team works under a Microsoft operating system, and uses Visual Studio, then indeed, this can be germane.
But you don't have to be using any Microsoft product at all, to reap some gain from the text. The key idea is to have a group of developers who maintain a centralised build process. (They can certainly have other duties.) Here, the book argues about having a metalevel, if you will. Where this build process can and will change over the project's lifetime. If the project has several subgroups, as it will if it is large enough, then each subgroup uses this same central build to make its own binaries.
The centralising fights a natural tendency for a large project to have subgroups that drift apart. In part by imposing a top-down discipline on the subgroups to have their developments conform to this build.
The book also goes into various good practices that your group should use. These have been covered in other books on software projects. The distinctive part of the text is the above discussion on the centralised build.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Could be better
1 Feb 2006
Format:Paperback
The author of this book, Vincent Maria, appears to have extensive knowledge of and experience with the build process at Microsoft. His knowledge if presented properly would be a very interesting and valuable book. Unfortunately, this book fails to deliver.
I was looking forward to reading this book, so maybe my expectations were high. I can't recommend this book - it lacks content. The book is a little over 200 hundred pages and has 18 chapters. If you factor out the introductions and graphics, you get about 8 or 9 pages of content per chapter. It would be very difficult to cover any of the chapter topics in detail in 9 pages. What you get is a very high level introduction to a topic with very little usable information.
Given the short length of the book, it would be more acceptable if the author were very concise. Unfortunately, I found his writing style to be redundant. Also, the book seems to be stretching for content. For example, there are actually 2 pages of email rules like "never open attachments from strangers", 1 page on why you should learn XML and of course, there is almost a whole chapter dedicated to how great the new Microsoft Team Foundation product is. I think about a quarter of this book could have been removed without losing anything.
Some of the recommendations in this book are childish and unprofessional. For example, one side note included tips for test managers to "Say 'no' to development at least once a day." and "If people really want you to do something, they'll ask at least twice." and "On a regular basis, complain that the project is off track..."
The book is not completely bad. It is just not detailed enough to be useful. If you are implementing a build process from scratch, you might get a good overview from this book, but I would argue you could get better information from the Internet. One good source would be white papers from the patterns and practices group at Microsoft. There are also some good sources on build automation in the extreme and agile programming texts. If you are looking for a good resource on branching, check out Software Configuration Management Practices by Berczuk.
** Let me follow up with one caveat. Although it is hard to tell from the book title and jacket, this book is targeted at managers. With that in mind this book may give a non-technical manager a good review of the build process. For technical managers, I don't think this book has enough detail.
I was looking forward to reading this book, so maybe my expectations were high. I can't recommend this book - it lacks content. The book is a little over 200 hundred pages and has 18 chapters. If you factor out the introductions and graphics, you get about 8 or 9 pages of content per chapter. It would be very difficult to cover any of the chapter topics in detail in 9 pages. What you get is a very high level introduction to a topic with very little usable information.
Given the short length of the book, it would be more acceptable if the author were very concise. Unfortunately, I found his writing style to be redundant. Also, the book seems to be stretching for content. For example, there are actually 2 pages of email rules like "never open attachments from strangers", 1 page on why you should learn XML and of course, there is almost a whole chapter dedicated to how great the new Microsoft Team Foundation product is. I think about a quarter of this book could have been removed without losing anything.
Some of the recommendations in this book are childish and unprofessional. For example, one side note included tips for test managers to "Say 'no' to development at least once a day." and "If people really want you to do something, they'll ask at least twice." and "On a regular basis, complain that the project is off track..."
The book is not completely bad. It is just not detailed enough to be useful. If you are implementing a build process from scratch, you might get a good overview from this book, but I would argue you could get better information from the Internet. One good source would be white papers from the patterns and practices group at Microsoft. There are also some good sources on build automation in the extreme and agile programming texts. If you are looking for a good resource on branching, check out Software Configuration Management Practices by Berczuk.
** Let me follow up with one caveat. Although it is hard to tell from the book title and jacket, this book is targeted at managers. With that in mind this book may give a non-technical manager a good review of the build process. For technical managers, I don't think this book has enough detail.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Great introduction to scale-up build; could lose some of the history for more details
21 Nov 2005
Format:Paperback
If you're looking to critique your current build system or if you're about to scale from an ad-hoc build environment to a team of tens to hundreds of people, it would be good to pick up this book and get an understanding of one way that has been proven to scale. In addition, this book contains a lot of hard-earned knowledge about details of how to run a daily build and deal with any breaks that happen in them as well as how to specifically integrate some pieces of the Microsoft toolset in a way that will ensure that builds done on developer machines work the same as builds done in the build lab. You will come away from this book with a deep enough understanding to create a build lab and roll out a multi-site build environment.
People new to builds and who are enamored of continuous integration will also be interested in the chapter on SNAP. SNAP is an automated checkin system - rather than doing direct submissions to an SCC system, developers provide their change to SNAP, which does a full build/test verification to ensure that there are never build breaks. Why allow the main source code to contain breaks at all?
The one area this book could've improved was in the presentation of details. For example, it will be difficult for people outside of Microsoft to recreate a SNAP-like system given the high-level overview in the book. Also, the formatting of some of the textual files (like the XML files from ANT and MSBuild) wrapped excessively on the page, making it difficult to read.
Two caveats for honesty's sake: I was provided with a free copy of this book and met with Vincent when he was working on an early draft of this book. But speaking as the person who drove the creation of a unified build environment for Microsoft's Developer Division, this is the best presentation of the systems we use that is available outside of the company.
People new to builds and who are enamored of continuous integration will also be interested in the chapter on SNAP. SNAP is an automated checkin system - rather than doing direct submissions to an SCC system, developers provide their change to SNAP, which does a full build/test verification to ensure that there are never build breaks. Why allow the main source code to contain breaks at all?
The one area this book could've improved was in the presentation of details. For example, it will be difficult for people outside of Microsoft to recreate a SNAP-like system given the high-level overview in the book. Also, the formatting of some of the textual files (like the XML files from ANT and MSBuild) wrapped excessively on the page, making it difficult to read.
Two caveats for honesty's sake: I was provided with a free copy of this book and met with Vincent when he was working on an early draft of this book. But speaking as the person who drove the creation of a unified build environment for Microsoft's Developer Division, this is the best presentation of the systems we use that is available outside of the company.
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